Open Source software limits creativity

Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven.t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it...Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world.like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash — the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force...The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip.and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.

Isn’t most Open Source software just clones of existing products, with a few changes to make them better, mostly borrowed from closed-source software? Firefox stole tabbed browsing from Opera, but there were precursors even before that. OpenOffice is an inferior copy of Microsoft Office.